France could demand almost £1bn to renew Channel patrols, inquiry chief warns

The next three-year deal funding French patrols on the Channel could cost British taxpayers around £860 million, the chairman of the French parliamentary inquiry into the border accords has warned.

Sébastien Huyghe, who chairs the National Assembly’s commission of inquiry into the Touquet agreements, said France could seek a 40 per cent increase when the present deal runs out. The warning concerns the next funding cycle and is conditional on the present situation continuing. He put the potential total at €1 billion, equivalent to roughly £860 million at recent exchange rates.

“If the situation continues, we could find ourselves demanding a further 40 per cent increase in three years’ time, which would bring the total to €1billion,” he said, in comments reported this week.

“However, I am not sure the British would agree to increase funding by 40 per cent every three years simply because their country is attractive.”

No French request for a further 40 per cent has been made, and the French government has not set out a position on the next funding cycle.

The present agreement was signed in Dunkirk on 23 April by the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and the French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez. It commits £662 million over three years, covering 2026/27 to 2028/29, and replaced the £479 million deal struck by Rishi Sunak and President Macron in March 2023. Nothing in it commits Britain to any payment beyond that cycle. The Home Office set out the terms here.

The money funds French personnel, technology and intelligence operations aimed at preventing crossings. Under the new cycle the number of funded officers on the northern coast rises from 907 to 1,392, an increase of 53 per cent, alongside drones, helicopters, a new border police unit in Calais and an immigration detention centre in Dunkirk. A flexible portion of the funding is tied to results, with the money redirected to new measures if the agreed actions do not work.

The Home Office says joint work has prevented more than 42,000 crossings since the 2024 general election and led to the arrest of 480 smugglers in 2025. Even so, 41,472 people reached Britain in small boats last year, the second highest annual total on record, and in August a single dinghy carried 230 people across, itself a record.

Richard Thomson, National Director at the Great British PAC, said:

“The French have already received extraordinary sums from British taxpayers and delivered nothing resembling control of our border. We have even seen reports of French officials colluding with, or actively assisting, the very smuggling gangs they are being paid to stop.”

The reports behind that claim describe something narrower than criminal collusion, and they are disputed. In July the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, filmed French officers on a beach south of Boulogne as dozens of migrants waded out to a dinghy, and one officer told him: “Our order is to let them go. We just have to say to them, ‘Don’t do that. It’s dangerous.'” The Telegraph reported that France rarely intervenes in shallow water, citing the risk to migrants’ lives, and that officers have on a handful of occasions judged it safe to slash the dinghies. French rules allow police to act in shallow water only to rescue people in obvious danger, according to BBC reporting from the northern coast.

French officials said in August that patrols had stopped boats at sea on 10 occasions since the spring, and the director of maritime and small boat operations at Border Security Command rejected the suggestion that nothing was being done, saying images taken out of context gave a misleading impression. The claims centre on standing orders not to intervene in the shallows and on commanders’ assessments of risk. They are not established findings that French officials assisted smuggling networks.

The commission also examined Britain’s attraction as a destination. It estimates that a third of the people entering the EU illegally are trying to reach Britain, some 60,000 out of 170,000 in 2025, and it found that 71 per cent of those who cross the Channel or the North Sea are subsequently granted refugee status here.

“We have learnt that 71 per cent of those who manage to cross the English Channel or the North Sea are subsequently granted refugee status, which is a huge figure,” Mr Huyghe said. “As those attempting the crossing have a high chance of being granted permanent residence on British soil, I understand why they are willing to take every risk.”

He accepted that Britain was making efforts to reduce its pull, but said it “remains highly attractive due to its labour laws” and bore “significant responsibility” for the situation on the French coast.

No increase has been agreed. Huyghe’s 40 per cent figure depends on the situation remaining unchanged over the next three years.

Thomson nevertheless characterised Huyghe’s warning as a demand for further payment:

“Now they demand another 40 per cent, taking the bill beyond €1 billion. That is not cooperation. It is an open insult to the British people and proof that France sees this Labour Government as weak enough to keep paying.
“Not one penny more. Stop outsourcing our border defence. Sovereign nations defend their own frontiers.”

The French are not speaking with one voice. Mr Huyghe has urged his government to revisit the Le Touquet treaty, signed in 2003 and amended the following year, under which each country carries out border checks on the other’s soil. His own interior minister is reluctant. Mr Nuñez has opposed scrapping Le Touquet, warning it could produce a “massive influx” of migrants onto the Channel and North Sea coasts. He wants the returns arrangement known as “one in, one out”, under which Britain sends back some of those who arrive by small boat in return for taking an equivalent number of asylum seekers from France, replaced by a broader deal between London and the EU. That has not been agreed, and the existing scheme expires on 1 October.

The inquiry was not set up to extract more money from London. The National Assembly created it in January at the request of the left-wing Gauche Démocrate et Républicaine group, with Elsa Faucillon as its rapporteur, and it reported in July. It described the Franco-British border arrangements as “opaque and ineffective” and warned of a slow-burning humanitarian crisis. The criticism falls on both governments, not just the British one.

Britain pays to stop the boats. The boats keep coming.